Conversation is an autonomous word-world. In an anlternation of utterances, conversation is a spontaneous activity deprived of a precise communicative intent, a fortuitous joining of people in an exchange of speech, or it can be an intentional cooperation, directed towards an abstract goal having a meaningful substance. The complex psychological and intellectual motivation engenders a common world, conscious or not of its own existence. By trying to stress the idea that conversation is an autonomous universe, we appeal to the concept of conversational complicity. We call the solidarity and the cohesive responsibility that is manifested inside the linguistic interaction a CONVERSATIONAL COMPLICITY. Engaged in weaving their communicative interests, partners commit themselves to reciprocal solidarity. The concept of conversational complicity is used metaphorically, enabling us to perceive the inter-actional solidarity in the form of a co-agency, a multi-level cooperative activity.

This volume, the fifth in the series Case and Grammatical Relations across Languages, is devoted to genitive constructions in a range of Indo-European languages (Russian, French, Romanian, German and Swedish), as well as Finnish, Bantu languages and Northern Akhvakh (Northeast Caucasian). Definitions of genitives typically start out from the notion of an inflectional marker, often suffixal, that marks dependency relations of a noun phrase with respect to another noun phrase and conveys possessive meaning. The contributions in this volume demonstrate a huge range of variation in genitives, semantically (from possessive meaning to generalized dependency), morphologically (from affixes to different types of clitics) and syntactically (from adnominal uses to argument relations and adjunct uses). The volume contains both general surveys of genitives and case studies of the semantics, pragmatics and historical development of specific genitive constructions. It will be of interest to scholars and students in syntax, semantics, morphology, typology, and historical linguistics.

Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique g n rale was posthumously composed by his students from the notes they had made at his lectures. The book became one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, giving direction to modern linguistics and inspiration to literary and cultural theory. Before he died Saussure told friends he was writing up the lectures himself but no evidence of this was found. Eighty years later in 1996 a manuscript in Saussure's hand was discovered in the orangerie of his family house in Geneva. This proved to be the missing original of the great work. It is published now in English for the first time in an edition edited by Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler, and translated and introduced by Carol Sanders and Matthew Pires, all leading Saussure scholars. The book includes an earlier discovered manuscript on the philosophy of language, Saussure's own notes for lectures, and a comprehensive bibliography of major work on Saussure from 1970 to 2004. It is remarkable that for eighty years the understanding of Saussure's thought has depended on an incomplete and non-definitive text, the sometimes aphoristic formulations of which gave rise to many creative interpretations and arguments for and against Saussure. Did he, or did he not, see language as a-social and a-historical? Did he, or did he not, rule out the study of speech within linguistics? Was he a reductionist? These disputes and many others can now be resolved on the basis of the work now published. This reveals new depth and subtetly in Saussure's thoughts on the nature and complex workings of language, particularly his famous binary oppositions between form and meaning, the sign and what is signified, and language (langue) and its performance (parole).

This volume is a study addressed to professors and students interested in the philosophy of language. It is generally accepted, though in not sufficiently rigorous terms, that doxastic dialectics can be defined as being an exchange of opinions. Given the subjective rationality of doxa, the traditional doctrine uncovers philosophical limitations in this regard. Instead of minimizing the heuristic power of doxastic dialectics, this book looks at whether it might be possible to affirm doxa’s cognitive autonomy regarding episteme, focusing on the mechanism of decidability in doxastic thinking. The text advances three cognitive theses: that doxastic dialectics engenders cognitive intervals between belief, opinion and doxa; that doxastic dialectics opens conditions for an alternative truth, semantically constituted, not analytically proved; and that doxastic dialectics is the exclusive procedure by means of which the fundaments of axiology can be established.

This bibliography of semiotic studies covering the years 1975-1985 impressively reveals the world-wide intensification in the field. During this decade, national semiotic societies have been founded allover the world; a great number of international, national, and local semiotic conferences have taken place; the number of periodicals and book series devoted to semiotics has increased as has the number of books and dissertations in the field. This bibliography is the result of a dedicated effort to approach complete coverage.

This book is the first comprehensive grammar in English of present-day standard Romanian. It is an indispensable resource for Romance linguists, from advanced undergraduate level and above.

This book explores the micro-variation in the realization of definiteness across languages belonging to the Balkan Romance family: Romanian, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian and Megleno-Romanian. Daniela Isac offers a unified analysis of the different patterns observed, based on a post-syntactic spell-out rule.

Differential Object marking (DOM), a linguistic phenomenon in which a direct object is morphologically marked for semantic and pragmatic reasons, has attracted the attention of several subfields of linguistics in the past few years. DOM has evolved diachronically in many languages, whereas it has disappeared from others; it is easily acquired by monolingual children, but presents high instability and variability in bilingual acquisition and language contact situations. This edited collection contributes to further our understanding of the nature and development of DOM in the languages of the world, in acquisition, and in language contact, variation, and change. The thirteen chapters in this volume present new empirical data from Estonian, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, Hindi, Romanian and Basque in different acquisition contexts and learner populations. They also bring together multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives to account for the complexity and dynamicity of this widespread linguistic phenomenon.